“I hold that he’s worse than robbed me!” Judge Petty struck his knee with a tremulous fist. “He took one whole year off’n my life, that’s what he’s done—pure murder, ain’t it? Expectin’ to sell every mail, all summer, and then bein’ disappinted has shore took it out of me. Made an ol’ man of me, as you might say, as was hale and hearty. I might have knowed, too; you had only to look in his face to see what he was! ‘Crook’ was wrote all over him. There’s a law for the likes o’ Wilbur Dill—false pretenses.”
“Law!” contemptuously. “Pa” Snow spent more of his time downstairs now in a rocking chair upholstered with a soogan, where he could vent his bitterness at short range. Disappointment over the sale of “The Bay Horse” had made a socialist of him. “The law—a long way we’d get havin’ the law on him! The law’s no use to the poor man—he’s only got one weapon he can count on; and while I’ve never set out to let no man’s blood, if that skunk ever pokes his nose inside these premises he’ll find a red-hot Southerner waitin’ for him!” Mr. Snow looked so altogether ferocious that Ore City more than half believed him.
“Seems like everything this year has been agin us.” The despondent voice behind the stove sounded hopeless. “Burt’s proposition fizzlin’ out on the river is goin’ to hurt this camp wonderful. It’s surprisin’ how fast the news of a failure gits around among Capital. I knew the way he was startin’ in to work—in fact I told him—that he never could make nothin’.”
“When I first went down to work for him I advised steam but he goes ahead, and look what’s happened—broke down and you can gamble he won’t start up again.” Lannigan added confidently as though he spoke from personal knowledge—“Them stockholders is done puttin’ up money.”
“I warned him about the grade he was givin’ them sluice-boxes—I went to him first off, didn’t I?” Yankee Sam looked around for confirmation. “Do you mind I said at the time he wasn’t warshin’ that dirt fast enough?”
“Anyhow,” declared the Judge querulously, “he ought to ’a piped it off. T’were a hydraulickin’ proposition. He could handle it just twice as fast at half the cost. I sent him down word when I heard what he was doin’.”
“And wastin’ money like he did on all them new style riffles—expanded metal and cocoa matting! Gimme pole riffles with a little strap-iron on the top and if you can’t ketch it with that you can’t ketch it with nothin’.”
“Mostly,” said Ma Snow who had come up behind the critic’s chair unnoticed, “you’ve ketched nothin’.” She went on in her plaintive voice:
“It’s a shame, that’s what it is, that Bruce Burt didn’t just turn over his business to you-all this summer. With shining examples of success to advise him, like’s sittin’ here burnin’ up my wood t’hout offerin’ to split any, he couldn’t have failed. Personally, I wouldn’t think of makin’ a business move without first talkin’ it over with the financiers that have made Ore City the money centre that it is!”
“Everybody can learn something,” Yankee Sam retorted with a show of spirit.